16 June 2010

Hope&change meet fix-the-leak

instead of the vague dreaming, we needed (1) a review of concrete fix-it methods for the leak, and then (2) short-term mechanisms that will lessen dependence on oil. Instead, we got nothing detailed how to solve the problem, more green dreaming, more now-is-the-moment campaign mode, more "some say, others say," and more "they will pay."

If we could defeat Hitler, we can hike your utility bills! If we could put a man on the moon, we can put an American manufacturing job in India! Yes, we can!

Jay Leno had a line last night that captures a lot of people's attitudes toward this address: "President Obama announced tonight that he wants to use the oil spill to move America toward green energy. I have a crazy idea. Maybe he should use the oil spill crisis to fix the oil spill."

Either the government knows how to stop the oil spill or it doesn’t. If they know how to stop it, then why have they let thousands of barrels of oil per day keep gushing out, for weeks on end? All they have to do is tell BP to step aside, while the government comes in to do it right.

If they don’t know, then what is all this political grandstanding about keeping their boot on the neck of BP, the attorney general of the United States going down to the Gulf to threaten lawsuits — on what charges was unspecified — and President Obama showing up in his shirt sleeves? Just what is Obama going to do in his shirt sleeves, except impress the gullible? He might as well have shown up in a tuxedo with white tie, for all the difference it makes.

This government is not about governing. It is about creating an impression. That worked on the campaign trail in 2008, but it is a disaster in the White House, where rhetoric is no substitute for reality.

Obama told Politico over the weekend that the oil spill has "echoes of 9/11." Americans thought differently about "our vulnerabilities" after the events of 9/11, Obama said, and the oil spill is "going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come."[...]This is, not to put too fine a point on it, one of the most bizarre things ever said by any president. It is worth considering the meaning of this profoundly wrongheaded analogy tonight when the president delivers his first Oval Office address -- his latest attempt to minimize the political damage the oil spill is wreaking on his reputation. The first thing that needs to be said is this: The only thing the oil spill and 9/11 have in common is nothing.[...]One was purposeful destruction intended to harm. The other is a purposeless catastrophe that was in no way intentional at all but will do great harm. One was an attack on the United States. The other was an accident. So what on earth could the president have been thinking?[...] By comparing an unwanted disaster to a conscious act of war, Obama is adding an improper moral dimension to the effort to clean up the Gulf -- a moral reckoning that will make it harder rather than easier to focus on the task of actually plugging the damn hole. [...] By likening the murder of 3,000 people and the efforts to take out the US government to a series of mistakes that added up to a catastrophe, Obama has defined evil down in a fashion that does immense violence to good sense, good taste and good leadership.

Orgogliosamente

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